


to the hair, not her fingers

by adazzledim



Series: the purest element [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Depression, F/F, Haircuts, Light Angst, Post-Season/Series 01, Pre-Femslash, all friends to lovers angst is better if it's gay sorry i don't make the rules, no proofreading we post our unedited self-indulgent bullshit like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14446293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adazzledim/pseuds/adazzledim
Summary: She cuts her hair, after the... after.





	to the hair, not her fingers

**Author's Note:**

> brought to you by [that one tweet](https://twitter.com/sophcolette/status/946966083591950336). title from a poem by minnie bruce pratt.

She cuts her hair, after the… after. Nominally it's for practical reasons, and to a certain extent it actually is: the med team at the Playground keep wanting to do followup CT scans and so forth on her, and the whole get-up of the machine and the little pluggy things aren't harder with long hair as such. They're certainly easier without it, though, curly bloody mess it's always been. (Jemma, carding her hands through Fitz's curls, laughing _no, don't straighten it, it looks lovely like this, it looks like_ you _–_ )

 That's the first reason, anyhow.

The second, equally practical but so oddly shameful that she'd never admit it to anyone, is that between the bad hand and the weird irrational thing she apparently has about water now and the general listlessness about looking presentable, whatever that's supposed to even mean – between all that, Fitz just can't deal with keeping it nice. All aesthetic conceits aside, the energy that having long hair requires just to keep it clean and untangled (which sounds simple, doesn't it, unless you're too fucking pathetic to take a proper shower or to hold a brush steady long enough to use it) is energy she just doesn't have.

So that's how May finds her, about a month after being released from her bed in the sickbay: standing in one of the bathrooms, one hand braced on the sink and the other, shaking, gripping a pair of scissors, staring at herself in the mirror, trying to psych herself up to just fucking – do it. Do it, c'mon, just one snip and you're home free, that's it, you'll be –

"Fitz," May says quietly, behind her, and all Fitz's nerve blows away like a puff of smoke. She drops the scissors, which make an ugly porcelain noise on the sink, and kind of folds in on herself.

Silence, for a minute or so, thick and cloying, and then: "Is there anything I can help you with?"

"Hair," Fitz says, surprising herself by even responding. She makes a fluttery abortive gesture around her head with her good hand. "I w-w-w-wanted it. Wanted to, uh, to – cut off."

May regards her for a moment, reflected in the mirror, face as impassive as ever. "You want a haircut," she says.

Fitz nods vigorously, not really trusting herself to speak.

"How short?"

Fitz gestures around her head again. "Gone," she forces out.

“You’re sure?” May’s tone betrays nothing, but Fitz thinks she sees, in the mirror, her eyebrows raise just a fraction. 

She nods again.

“Hm,” May says, “alright,” and “don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back soon.” True to her word, she returns five minutes later carrying a towel, one of the shitty plastic chairs from the canteen, and what Fitz recognises as a set of clippers. Coulson’s, she thinks, and can’t find a name for the emotion that fills her with.

May gets her settled in the chair with the towel around her shoulders, grabs the scissors where they lie abandoned by the sink, and gets to work. A couple of snips, and Fitz’s hair gathers cloudlike around her ears; then May turns the clippers on, and – and –

The third reason emerges, then, out of May’s steady hands and the harsh soothing buzz of the razor; Fitz stares at the face in the mirror, cold air teasing at the back of her neck, and thinks: _oh._ Thinks: _there I am_ . Why has this never occurred to her before? This is, this is _right_ in a way she can’t even explain to herself. She looks like herself, again, for the first time.

Simmons pokes her head in the door as May is buzzing the bit at the base of Fitz’s skull, where the hair forms a soft arrow pointing down to her spine. “Fitz!” she says, “oh, you look _lovely._ ”

“Yeah?” Fitz whispers.

“Yeah, you do. You’ve got such good bone structure, you can really see it properly now. It suits you.” She beams.

“Thanks,” Fitz mumbles, gaze dropping into her lap. May’s hands still for a moment. When she looks up again, Simmons is gone.

They’re done a moment later, May shaking the towel out onto the floor and brushing the last stray bristles off Fitz’s neck. “Good?” she asks.

Fitz looks at herself in the mirror, looks properly at what May’s done – drastically short at the back and sides, with just enough on top for a little bit of curl to show – looks at the strange new sharpness of her face, the angles of her cheekbones.

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, it’s. It’s perfect.”

 

May disappears to find a dustpan and brush. Fitz, feeling a little foolish now that the whole thing’s done, wanders into the common area, where Skye and Trip are playing something involving multiple packs of cards and lots of yelling. (Watching them play, though, she gets the impression that the yelling has less to do with the game itself and more to do with the way Skye and Trip just are around each other.) It takes a minute or two for them to realise she’s there.

Skye actually double-takes when she sees Fitz, which is… gratifying. “ _Wow,_ ” she says. “Okay. Fitz has hella cheekbones. How did I not notice that?”

“Beats me,” Trip grins. “Loving the hair, girl.”

“Yeah, it looks incredible,” Skye agrees. “Did that happen just now? Who did it?”

“Uh,” says Fitz, promptly losing the name. “It was, uh, it was… it was…” She gestures with her bad hand, trying to ignore how much it’s shaking. “May. Yeah. May cut my hair.”

“How does May know how to… okay, I am just not gonna ask how May knows how to cut hair like a frickin’ professional,” Skye says.

“You reckon there’s a story there?”

“ _Definitely._ What if she had to, like, go undercover as a hairdresser because the shop was actually a criminal front? Oh my god, imagine May killing someone with scissors.”

“Nah, that’s just ridiculous. The undercover, I mean, not the scissors of mass destruction. Also, you know that whatever you come up with, the answer’s probably even crazier, right?”

“Yeah. That’s kind of May’s style, isn’t it.”

“Mmm. Hey, Fitz?” Trip says, and Fitz realises, a moment too late, that he’s talking to her. “You wanna play?”

“Hm?”

“Yeah, you should come play,” Skye chimes in, waving a hand at where their cards lie abandoned on the table. “It’s called Bullshit and it’s super easy.”

“If it’s super easy, then how come I keep w–”

“And Trip absolutely is not kicking my ass at it anyway. You want in?”

“No, I should really – I have to – I should, uh. Go,” Fitz says, after an awkwardly long pause, and does.

“Why didn’t you stay?” says Simmons, catching up to her in the corridor. “They obviously wanted you to, and – well, you could do with some interaction, you haven’t exactly been social of late –”

“Yes, I-I’m sure they do, b-but – but _I_ don’t want to be there,” Fitz shoots back at her, still walking. “I h-have things to do in th-the lab. Important things. Lots to catch up on since I was incapa – inc – _out_ so long.” It’s a small victory just to trip over her words and not her own feet, not that she’d ever admit that to even herself.

“If you say so,” Simmons concedes, though she sounds concerned, and there’s something uneasy in the air between the two of them as they continue down the hall.

 

* * *

 

To give herself some kind of credit, Jemma does actually make it at least six weeks before something snaps. That’s better than nothing.

In the end, she’s not sure what gives first, what component of her strange solitary undercover life she’s forced too hard. She’s pulling overtime after overtime at the labs, staying back for hours that she ultimately spends doing little more than very busily twiddling her thumbs (she’s working for the bad guys, after all, Jemma doesn’t exactly want to _further their cause_ ) which in itself wouldn’t be too bad; there was a frantic season or so during their – during her time at SciOps during which getting home before eight p.m. was a rarity. But then she gets home and finds that sleep is impossible, no matter how badly her eyes sting with exhaustion and overuse, and there’s nothing for it but to curl up with Netflix and hope she drifts off sometime before one. She’s suddenly got a house to keep, which feels odd after so many months in a living situation that was essentially a glorified caravan. She’s exercising more than is probably reasonable and not quite eating enough to support it. She goes days where the only words that leave her mouth are work-related and weeks where she’s sleeping four hours a night at the most.

It all sounds very drastic, but she’s fine, really, she is. She’s still upright and functioning, and she doesn’t have any right to be anything but, does she?

(Jemma’s aware, in some distant part of herself, that she’s running herself into the ground, that she’s making promises her body can’t keep, and she’s a little trainwreck-fascinated by the inevitability of the eventual crash and burn. It’ll be utterly horrific, but she’ll be damned if she can take her eyes off the flames.)

So she’s in a very… interesting mental space, the night the banks burst, when she stumbles into the bathroom sometime between two and three in the morning and catches sight of herself in the mirror. The light hurts her eyes and the neck of her pyjama t-shirt is damp with sweat and she’s tired, she’s so tired, it’s a bold claim to make but Jemma Simmons is more tired than any human being has ever been before in all of recorded history. She’s having one of those nights, though, the kind where if she so much as blinks the backs of her eyelids are suddenly swarming with – not even proper nightmares, they don’t even have the decency to have some kind of narrative coherence, just weird patchy flashes of sunlight on water/sunlight under water/air rushing past her/Fitz’s face in the gloom of the pod/Fitz behind glass, panic dawning over her face/Fitz/ _more than that_ /Fitz/water. Sleep isn’t really an option; actually, sleep doesn’t feel like it’d be enough. A short break from existing altogether would be sufficient, probably.

Jemma opens her eyes wide enough to properly see her reflection and is suddenly hit by a wave of… deja-vu would probably come closest to describing it, but even that’s not quite right. Characters in books she’s read and romcoms and such are always having moments where they look at themselves in the mirror and don’t recognise the person staring back at them; what Jemma’s feeling is the diametric opposite of that sensation – she’s looking at herself and realising, with dizzying clarity, that she’s physically almost indistinguishable from a year ago. Last summer there was a girl who had never heard of electrostatically propagating xenoviruses or attempting first aid on a friend dying from multiple gunshot wounds or all the different ways a person can come out of a coma permanently changed, and by some incomprehensible injustice Jemma is still walking around wearing her face. She’s only invisibly different, and somehow that’s – it’s so –

“No,” she tells the girl in the mirror out loud, as some cavernous awfulness wells up inside her chest, a black hole that can do nothing but consume. “No, you can’t – don’t – if you –” and she rubs at her tired eyes and tries to convince herself she has the strength to fight off the urge to cry that’s clawing at the sides of her throat, if only because she suspects that at this point, it’d actually take more strength to give in to it.

Because Jemma’s fine, there’s absolutely nothing wrong, but the last time she touched another person was when Skye hugged her goodbye at the Playground nearly two months ago, and when you’ve spent the past decade in symbiotic security-blanket best friendship with a boundaryless puppy of a girl, it turns out it’s kind of hard to go cold turkey on physical affection, and she’s so cold. Crying, she’s learned, is infinitely easier when one has a shoulder to do it on, and the metaphorical corner she’s backed herself into is unfortunately light on shoulders. She’s so _cold_ , and she wants Fitz back, she wants to figure out why her heart hasn't stopped whirling like a hurricane since Fitz's confession, she wants the world to stop feeling like it doesn’t fit quite right, she wants – she wants –

– well, she can’t really put words to what it is she wants, so in the end Jemma just goes back to bed and curls up and breathes through the giant wrongness instead of crying about it and doesn’t realise she’s drifted off until her alarm wakes her up at quarter to six. As breakdowns go, it’s ludicrously tame, but it’s enough for her to realise that if she wants to keep going, if she wants to maintain her cover and be of any use to Coulson and the team, something’s got to give.

She spends a few hours of her work day wondering what exactly she can change, doing her titrations on autopilot, before remembering something Skye said about closure and haircuts and unwise post-breakup decisions. The more Jemma thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Besides, she’s about due for a trim.

(She doesn’t let herself think about the _post-breakup_ part too hard, for… reasons.)

She makes an appointment during her lunch break, before she can talk herself out of it, and before she knows it it’s Saturday morning and she’s sitting in the waiting room at the hairdresser’s, trying to figure out exactly what she wants done. In the end, when the lady asks, she says, “Oh, I’d just like to… change things up a bit.”

Her hair falls just above chin-length by the time she leaves, feathery at the sides of her face and streaked through with honey. It’s shocking and strangely grown-up, the effect it has on her overall appearance; she keeps pulling her fingers through it and forgetting how little of it there is. There’s still a tight restless loneliness wedged in somewhere under her diaphragm, but she’s sleeping a little better and she can stand to look at herself in the mirror again, and Jemma thinks she can allow herself to take that as a victory.

**Author's Note:**

> the idea of girl!fitz has been haunting me since this time last year and Would Not Leave Me Be until i finished at least one thing featuring her. stay tuned for the unlikely event that i actually manage to write more in this universe


End file.
